Critical Asian Studies

Hegemonic Aspirations

New Middle Class Politics and India's Democracy in Comparative Perspective

Abstract:

This article uses an analysis of the rise of India's New Middle Class
(NMC) to develop a class analytics of democratic politics in India. The
article locates the politics of India's democracy within the framework
of comparative class analytics and integrates class analysis with the
politics of caste, religion, and language. The article develops two
central arguments. The first is that the dominant fraction of the
middle class plays a central role in the politics of hegemony. These
hegemonic politics are played out both as attempts to coordinate the
interests of the dominant classes and to forge internal unity within
the highly diverse fragments of the middle class. But rather than
producing the classical pattern of liberal hegemony (in which the
ruling bloc actively elicits the consent of subordinate classes) in
India these projects have been marked by middle-class illiberalism, and
most notably a distancing from lower classes. Second, we argue that the
contours of the NMC can be grasped as a class-in-practice, that
is, as a class defined by its politics and the everyday practices
through which it reproduces its privileged position. Sociocultural
inequalities such as caste and language are an integral part of the
process of middle-class formation. We argue that the NMC is a tangible
and significant phenomenon, but one whose boundaries are constantly
being defined and tested. The hegemonic aspirations of the NMC have
taken the form of a politics of reaction, blending market liberalism
and political and social illiberalism.